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Senate Russia Probe Founders Amid Partisan Bickering

More than three months after the Senate Intelligence Committee launched its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election
— including allegations of collusion by associates of President Trump —
the panel has made little progress and is increasingly stymied by
partisan divisions that are jeopardizing the future of the inquiry,
according to multiple sources involved in the probe.

The
committee has yet to issue a single subpoena for documents or interview
any key witnesses who are central to the probe, the sources said. It
also hasn’t requested potentially crucial evidence — such as the emails,
memos and phone records of the Trump campaign — in part because the
panel’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., has so far failed to
respond to requests from the panel’s Democrats to sign letters doing so,
the sources said.

“The
wheels seem to be turning more slowly than the importance of the
inquiry would indicate,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11
commission and former Watergate prosecutor, one of a number of veteran
Washington investigators who have begun to question the lack of movement
in the probe.

As Congress returns from its spring recess
this week and Trump approaches his 100th day in office, the panel
has no further public hearings scheduled, even as the House Intelligence
Committee — torn by its own partisan wrangling and internal turmoil
— shows some flickering new signs of life.

The result has caused
growing frustration among the Senate committee’s Democrats, who are
privately complaining the probe is underfunded, understaffed and too
timid in pushing to get to the bottom of one of the most explosive
political stories in years.

“I
would like to see this moving more quickly,” Sen. Martin Heinrich,
D-N.M., a member of the panel, said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Sen.
Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking minority member on the panel, has
repeatedly said the Russia investigation “may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”
And until now, Warner has sought to project an appearance of bipartisan
unity with Burr, portraying the probe as a methodical inquiry that will
follow the facts wherever they lead.

But
Warner’s handling of the probe has led to grumbling among some of his
Democratic colleagues that he has been too reluctant to challenge Burr
and press for more aggressive action — for fear of undercutting the
perception that he and the Republican chairman are working cooperatively
together. “He’s been afraid to even bring up the S-word,” said one
source familiar with the details of the investigation, referring to the
panel’s authority to issue subpoenas for documents.

More than three months after the Senate Intelligence Committee launched its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election
— including allegations of collusion by associates of President Trump —
the panel has made little progress and is increasingly stymied by
partisan divisions that are jeopardizing the future of the inquiry,
according to multiple sources involved in the probe.

The
committee has yet to issue a single subpoena for documents or interview
any key witnesses who are central to the probe, the sources said. It
also hasn’t requested potentially crucial evidence — such as the emails,
memos and phone records of the Trump campaign — in part because the
panel’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., has so far failed to
respond to requests from the panel’s Democrats to sign letters doing so,
the sources said.

In January: President Trump speaks by phone with Russian President
Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington.
(Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

“The
wheels seem to be turning more slowly than the importance of the
inquiry would indicate,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11
commission and former Watergate prosecutor, one of a number of veteran
Washington investigators who have begun to question the lack of movement
in the probe.

As Congress returns from its spring recess
this week and Trump approaches his 100th day in office, the panel
has no further public hearings scheduled, even as the House Intelligence
Committee — torn by its own partisan wrangling and internal turmoil
— shows some flickering new signs of life.

The result has caused
growing frustration among the Senate committee’s Democrats, who are
privately complaining the probe is underfunded, understaffed and too
timid in pushing to get to the bottom of one of the most explosive
political stories in years.

“I
would like to see this moving more quickly,” Sen. Martin Heinrich,
D-N.M., a member of the panel, said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Sen.
Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking minority member on the panel, has
repeatedly said the Russia investigation “may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”
And until now, Warner has sought to project an appearance of bipartisan
unity with Burr, portraying the probe as a methodical inquiry that will
follow the facts wherever they lead.

But
Warner’s handling of the probe has led to grumbling among some of his
Democratic colleagues that he has been too reluctant to challenge Burr
and press for more aggressive action — for fear of undercutting the
perception that he and the Republican chairman are working cooperatively
together. “He’s been afraid to even bring up the S-word,” said one
source familiar with the details of the investigation, referring to the
panel’s authority to issue subpoenas for documents.

There
are signs Warner’s patience is starting to wear thin. Warner “is not
satisfied with the pace of the investigation and he doesn’t think it’s
moving fast enough,” a committee source tells Yahoo News. “He would like
to have seen more hearings and more interviews with witnesses.”

There
are signs Warner’s patience is starting to wear thin. Warner “is not
satisfied with the pace of the investigation and he doesn’t think it’s
moving fast enough,” a committee source tells Yahoo News. “He would like
to have seen more hearings and more interviews with witnesses.”

But
behind the scenes, while suffering none of the public embarrassments of
the House inquiry, the Senate probe has been fraught with its own
conflicts. Initially, its progress was stalled because it took weeks to
work out an agreement with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other U.S.
intelligence community officials to provide Senate committee staffers
access to “raw intelligence” documents that formed the basis for the
Jan. 6 “assessment” that Russian president Vladimir Putin authorized a
multifaceted campaign during the 2016 election to sew distrust among the
American electorate, discredit Hillary Clinton and boost the chances of
Trump, sources said.

The
issue was finally worked out, but only a limited number of staffers
assigned to the probe were allowed to review the thousands of pages of
material: three Republican and two Democratic aides, plus the respective
staff directors for each party, both of whom had other standard
oversight duties. (Of the two Democrats assigned by Warner to the probe,
one was a junior staffer who is also going to law school; another
Democratic investigator has since been hired and is expected to begin
work next month, a committee source said.)

The
limited access infuriated some senators, notably Sen. Ron Wyden,
D-Ore., who demanded that their intelligence committee aides also be
given the opportunity to review the same material. But Burr, who has
long feuded with Wyden, refused to go along, resulting in a standoff
that has badly divided the committee.

That
standoff has spilled over into other areas. The committee early on sent
letters to key witnesses — such as Flynn, Page, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone
— to preserve all documents that might be relevant to the
investigation. One such letter was also sent to White House counsel
McGahn, who previously served as chief counsel to the Trump campaign and
has authority over its records.

But
the committee has still not sent any follow up letters even asking for
their documents — much less issued a subpoena demanding they be turned
over. Although letters requesting the material were drafted by
Democratic staffers, Burr has so far declined to sign them, leaving the
panel’s investigators powerless to review key material necessary to
pursue the issues of possible collusion.

Moreover,
the committee also hasn’t even approached potentially key witnesses to
schedule interviews with them. Manafort, Stone and Page have all
publicly volunteered to be questioned by the committee staff. But so
far, the committee seems stuck in a version of Catch-22: It has yet to
follow up on those offers, in large part because it doesn’t want to
interview them until it has reviewed their documents and emails, which
the committee hasn’t asked for. (Flynn, through his lawyer, also has
offered to talk but only until he first receives immunity — a step the
committee is in no rush to even consider.)

So
what has the committee been doing for three months? The five staffers
assigned to the case have been methodically reviewing the classified raw
intelligence documents that formed the basis for the Jan. 6 assessment
— and that, in turn, has lead to the discovery of more documents that
are potentially relevant, sources say. It also has compiled a lengthy
witness list that staffers have begun to winnow down.

But
some veteran Washington investigators say the committee is frittering
away one of its most important assets — a sense that is aggressively
moving to get to the truth.

“It’s
important to show some momentum and appear to have some momentum,” said
Michael Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor who participated in
the Iran-Contra investigation and later served as Justice Department
inspector general. “If there’s radio silence for a few months, you lose a
valuable asset.”